Toleration and absolutism

In his history of the idea of toleration, the late A.J. Conyers summarizes the arguments of Robert P. Kraynak on the development of Locke’s thought on religious toleration. The puzzle is this: Locke’s early works are absolutist in a Hobbesian vein, invoking the supreme magistrate’s power to oversee religion for the good and peace of men. Of course, the later Locke became one of the most important apologists for religious toleration. Kraynak argued that Locke didn’t fundamentally change his perspective, but merely offered alternative tactics for the management of religion.

Religious war and sectarian hostility was the main political problem for seventeenth century theorists, including Locke. Orthodoxy was contested, and in this pluralist situation there were two options. In Conyers’s summary:

“One option is ‘secular absolutism, in which the state establishes a religion but makes no claim it is the true religion.’ This was Hobbes’s solution, and it became in essence the option first taken by Locke. The other option is liberal toleration. In this case, religion is no less subordinated to the state: it is relegated to the sphere of private life and prevented from having meaningful political influence because ‘the disestablishment of religion deprives them [the priests] of all pretexts for interfering in politics.’ The change that students of Locke have noticed, and puzzled over, as they have compared the early writings to the later, is a change in strategy, as Kraynak sees it, and not a change in ‘purpose and principle.’”

Two observations: First, Kraynack makes the point in startling terms: Interpreters of Locke “have not considered the possibility that absolutism is the original form of liberalism.” This is one of Conyers’s key themes: Locke’s defense of toleration assumes that individuals are isolated rather than associated; Locke and other theorists of toleration assume a world where the state confronts not an articulated society with various existing authorities but a collection of individuals.

Second, Locke appears to be driven at least to some degree by the same kind of anti-priestly animus that is more explicit in Hobbes.